Yeah, that is the best practice for exactly those reasons.

Certainly, there are cases where updates are just fine (essentially, where the update is helpful to people seeing the node for the first time but won't be missed by those who have already read the node).

As for augmenting Newest nodes with Newestly minorly updated nodes and Newestly majorly updated nodes and User settings for what constitutes 'major' vs 'minor', no, as you can probably tell from my ficticious title choices, I don't see that as a great direction to go. (And the "this is a major update" checkbox has been a good example of a site feature that doesn't work very well in practice.)

So I don't see much value in complex features for assigning timestamps to updates, etc. The best way to put a timestamp on a clarification is to put that clarification in a new node.